This disclosure relates generally to posted media in social networking systems, and in particular to adding paid links to media captions in a social networking system.
Social networking systems allow users to share content with other users. Some social networking systems enable users to share media content in particular, such as images and videos. When sharing media content, it is often useful for users to add annotations to explain or describe the content item. Thus, social networking systems may enable users to add captions or other types of annotations to images or videos that the users post to the system. Typically, social networking systems do not restrict the content that users can add to captions: while the social networking system may limit the format of the content to text and may limit the amount of text users can enter, the users may be able to enter any desired text with few, if any, other restrictions. In some cases, users may enter link text, such as a uniform resource locator or another type of address specifying a digital location, to direct other users of the social networking system to an external location, such as the user's personal web page. However, freely allowing users to enter link text and generate a corresponding link may result in undesirable captions or promotion of links for a user that are not of interest to other users, and may risk spamming other users with undesirable links. Directing users to web pages or applications outside of the social networking system also reducing user engagement with the social networking system.